Category Archives: Bible

Book Notes: Jesus Mean and Wild


Christianity Today managing editor Mark Galli’s lively, challenging book Jesus Mean and Wild: The Unexpected Love of an Untamable God explores the many gospel passages where Jesus breaks out of the sentimental “meek and mild” model that we mistake for love. Every era has its characteristic blind spots about Scripture, such as the Victorian missionaries’ connection to an imperialism that clashed with Christian ethics. Ours is believing that love and judgment are opposed. If Jesus is love, we conclude he must have been ever-patient, ever-kind, undemanding, never criticizing sinners. To his credit, Galli recognizes that unskillful shame-based religious leaders and communities bear some of the blame for this over-correction.

In a succession of chapters exploring passages from Mark’s gospel where Jesus is anything but “nice,” Galli shows how the qualities of Jesus’ love that seem so fearsome — impatience, harsh criticism, radical ethical demands — are really the qualities that make his love life-transforming and effective against evil. Galli is a dialectical and dynamic thinker, holding opposite principles in tension rather than exalting one over the other, in a way that seems faithful to the multifaceted nature of Jesus in the Bible. He reasons clearly, while recognizing the inability of theological reasoning alone to show us how to balance competing values in any given situation.

As this book reminds us, an advantage of faith over secular philosophy is that we need not (in fact, should not) solve these problems on our own. We are not adrift between the Scylla of rigid legalism and the Charybdis of ethical chaos. We can ask God for personal guidance in applying the complex messages of the Bible to our lives. Galli writes, “Prayer is a mysterious, unfathomable, intense conversation with the Father, who will not give us formulas and principles but will give us himself.”

In prayer, Jesus discovered how to give of himself more selflessly than most of us can imagine doing, yet also to move on from towns where there were many invalids still to be healed, so that he could follow his call to ministry elsewhere. The Jesus of the gospels is neither heartless nor a doormat, but we might become either one if we turn one polarity of his character into an abstract rule — if we want to be right, for certain and by our own power, rather than to be led by the Spirit.

The discussion of prayer is a small part of Galli’s book, but it made a big impression on me. It helped me see what Christians mean when they talk about letting the Holy Spirit open the words of Scripture to you. I had been reading the Bible as an ordinary book and trying to perceive with my intellect whether it was divinely inspired. In other words, there was only one person in the conversation, me. The only alternative I could see was “believing” the propositions I thought I found there, whether they made sense to me or not. However, this just seemed like another one-sided conversation, only the speaker was the anonymous writer of the Bible pasage. What gave another mortal such authority over my conscience? Now, I’m hoping to discover a third way, one that begins with listening to God, and letting go of some of my fears of “getting it wrong” due to my lack of Christian education. (Of course, I’d have to make time to read the Bible first…how many months do I have left on that New Year’s resolution?)

From the edgy typeface and crown-of-thorns motif on the cover, I suspect that Galli’s book is especially aimed at Christian men (perhaps the same ones who bought John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart) who find the rosy-cheeked blond Jesus of modern devotional art to be just a little too passive, too unheroic, too…girly-man. Is the evangelical anxiety about homosexuality (nearly always male homosexuality, though conservative magazines occasionally run nutty articles about rampant lesbianism among high school soccer players) partly due to Christian men’s feeling that their religion is already dangerously emasculating? Galli has done his male readers a service by depicting a Jesus who uses authority and aggression in the service of love, who is unpredictable, who takes risks and asks us to do the same.

The passage I quote below, from a chapter titled “The Joy of Unfulfilled Desire,” particularly spoke to issues I’m confronting as I write my novel. So much of sexual sin arises from a misplaced desire for transcendence, seeking to exceed or submerge the self in the other. While lust leads to idolatry and commodification when it’s separated from an unselfish commitment to the beloved in her full personhood, the false freedom of promiscuity nonetheless points to the truth that something of the soul’s longing is left over even in the most fulfilling marriages. Without meaning to, I’ve gotten one of my fictional characters into such a predicament that even his boyfriend’s unselfish love can’t save him: he needs the gospel, good and hard. And I, in the so-called real world, am looking for a church where he’ll get it.

But now back to Galli. Reflecting on why Jesus masked his messages in parables, he writes:


The gospel has an element of mystery, no matter who is at the receiving end. For those with hardened hearts, the mystery remains impenetrable. For those who seek out Jesus for an explanation, some of the mystery is removed — and at the same time, more mystery is encountered….(p.103)

That our questions will remain unanswered and our longings unfulfilled is precisely the glorious nature of heaven. We are finite beings who are limited in knowledge, in space, and by time….But here is where we differ from the rest of the created order: God has placed eternity in our hearts (Eccles. 3:11)….(p.104)

This eternity in our hearts often frustrates us to such a degree that we take shortcuts to bridge the gap between our longing and its fulfillment. This is one way to define original sin. Adam and Eve felt they could not live with finite knowledge, and so they reached out for the knowledge of good and evil by eating of the very tree that God forbade. And with that one act, they became aware even more acutely of the gap between the eternity in their hearts and the finiteness of their nature. This in turn made them want all the more to close that gap prematurely….

All sins are in one sense an attempt to fulfill a genuine, righteous longing, but in a way that is inappropriate. Augustine talks about this in his Confessions: “The soul commits fornication when she is turned from thee, and seeks apart from thee what she cannot find pure and untainted until she returns to thee.” He then goes on to ask what the godly thing was he desired when he infamously stole a pear from a farmer’s field. He finally concludes that he was seeking freedom “to rebel against thy law…so that, even as a captive, I might produce a sort of counterfeit liberty.”

As material beings, we want to enjoy the material blessings of this earth. We also long for sexual intimacy. We want to be respected and honored. Most of all, we want to know and be known by our Creator and to please him. But there are inappropriate ways to satisfy righteous longings, and since the time of Moses these inappropriate means have been given names: adultery, coveting, idolatry, and so forth.

But — and this is crucial — it isn’t as if there is a righteous way to find complete fulfillment of any of our holy longings. To be sure, marriage is a wonderful place to attain a degree of sexual intimacy. Honesty and hard work are the divinely appointed means for earning and enjoying material blessings. Authentic worship of the invisible God is the path to a deeper relationship with him. Yes, God will give to those who seek, knock, and ask; he will fulfill our longings for wisdom and love — but only up to a point.

To be human is to be finite and to have eternity placed in our hearts, which means we know that we will forever exist as finite beings, with infinity — that is, perfect fulfillment of all our longings — just out of reach.

There is only one being for whom all longings have been completely fulfilled (so to speak), so much so that we say he is a being who has no needs. We are decidedly not that being, and we never will be. We will always, forever even in the kingdom, long for more.

Yet — and this is also crucial — this is not a frustrated longing, but an infatuated longing. When a young man and woman fall in love, they have found another person who suddenly fascinates them. This woman is the first person I think of when I wake up and the last person I think of before going to sleep. I relish every minute I spend with her. I ask her all sorts of questions about her life, her interests, her passions. The more I know, the more I realize I don’t know, and my fascination becomes even more intense. When we fall out of love — out of this giddy, wonderful period — it’s partly because we run out of energy to be continually fascinated. And we become bored and selfish and a host of other things. But the experience returns now and then throughout marriage, and it is this experience that reflects, I believe, the type of experience we’ll have with God for eternity: an endless falling in love, an endless fascination, an endless pursuing of the mystery of God — and the fact that we are never fully satisfied is precisely one reason we’ll find the kingdom of heaven such a joy. (pp.104-06)

This is good news to me as an artist: I couldn’t enjoy a heaven without creativity, where every satisfaction was already complete. Or a heaven without sadness, perhaps not the horror of depression but the pleasant sadness of a rainy day, the darkness of fear and danger that is the flip side of desire. Christian art would be much better if it were less afraid of what Henry Vaughan called the “deep and dazzling darkness” of God, the absence He gives us so that our hearts will be stirred to seek Him.

Gay Christian Freedom Riders Tour Evangelical Colleges


The Washington Post‘s Hannah Rosin reported in Friday’s newspaper about a bus tour sponsored by the gay Christian organization Soulforce. This group of young people visits evangelical colleges to witness, by their presence, to their conviction that they can be true to both their sexual orientation and their faith:


Even on American highways crowded with giant family cars, buses are still big enough to make a point. For his acid tour in 1964, Ken Kesey had his Merry Pranksters repaint a 1939 school bus in psychedelic colors with brooms. These days buses are plastic-wrapped with their messages, like giant Twinkies on a mission.

The one driving down Route 7 in Virginia yesterday was purplish on one side and orange sunset on the other. In huge letters it said “Social Justice for Gay, Bisexual and Transgender People.” On the highway, fellow drivers either honked and waved or threw Coke cans. In Sioux City, Iowa, someone spray-painted the bus with “Fag, God doesn’t love you.”

…The 25 “equality riders” from a group called Soulforce have roughly followed certain routes of the Freedom Riders who battled Southern segregation in the 1960s.

Instead of bus stations and restaurants, they stop at conservative evangelical colleges they say discriminate against homosexuals. Last week it was Bob Jones University in Greenville, S.C. Yesterday it was Patrick Henry College, a seven-year-old evangelical institution in Purcellville, Va., with grand political ambitions. It was founded by Michael Farris, a leader in the home-schooling movement.

 A Patrick Henry press release announcing the visit called them a “traveling group of homosexual activists” and “false teachers.” Many of the riders come from evangelical families and attended colleges like the ones they visit. At some point they decided that, despite what their church told them, they could be Christian and gay….

Police cars were parked all along the driveway and across the entrance of the school. About 45 officers made a human barrier. The riders had seen plenty of police presence, but this was “intense,” said Katie Higgins, one of the organizers.

Patrick Henry did not forbid its students to talk to the riders, but strongly encouraged them not to. In a letter to parents, the school’s president called Soulforce’s presence a “rude and offensive disruption” and accused the riders of trying to “manipulate” students.

The riders filed out of the bus and stood in a line. Some held signs: “Open Dialogue” and “All at God’s Table.” They had all taken care to dress professionally, but “professional” is a relative term. At Patrick Henry, boys wear suits to class and girls look like young interns on the Hill. Although the dress code does not mention them, one senses that the riders’ nose rings, arms full of tattoos and pink headbands on males would be frowned upon. Reynolds looked neat, but by Patrick Henry standards boy neat, in a pinstriped button-down shirt and slacks.

Reynolds made a brief statement calling herself a “child of God, a follower of Christ and a lesbian.” Jarrett Lucas and Josh Polycarpe, both 21-year-old African American activists, walked past a “Private Property, No Trespassing” sign. They were politely arrested and driven away.

Afterward, Patrick Henry senior Michael Holcomb was given permission to talk to reporters. When asked why he thought Soulforce had come, Holcomb struggled. “I think they have a certain idea of…a certain view of sexuality…a view of Christianity…sorry, I need to think about this.”

But when asked his own view he had no trouble. “It’s not that we hate them. It’s just that they engage in a behavior that’s against God’s word,” he said. “God instituted marriage as between one man and one woman and He wants people to experience the fullness of that. If not, things are not going to work right.”

Soulforce visits often bring gay students and alumni out of hiding, and this was no exception. Three alumni contacted Reynolds during the visit; she said one told her he was gay and that his time at Patrick Henry had been the “hardest four years of his life.”

David Hazard, a friend of college founder Farris who had edited one of his books, also told Reynolds he was gay. When Farris heard that during an interview in his office, his jaw fell open, and he stared for a long time. “Oh. I’m so sorry for David,” he said. “I think he’s deluded.” The place for someone like that, he added, “is on their knees repenting of their sin.

“But here’s a good reaction for you: I still like him.”
Read the whole story here. To donate to the Soulforce Equality Ride, click here.

The Cross Is Only the Beginning


In this week’s free email newsletter from Relevant Magazine, web editor Jesse Carey asks why Christian iconography puts so much emphasis on the cross, a symbol of death, when our faith is about new life. Carey suggests that understanding sin and punishment comes naturally to us, whereas God’s grace exceeds the bounds of logic and human control:


[I]n a way, the crucifixion makes sense. For most people, judgment is logical. Death is inescapable. Witnessing a man die only takes observation. Believing He rose from a tomb requires faith. Maybe the reason many Christians seem to embrace the crucifixion and put little emphasis on the resurrection is because Jesus dying on the cross makes more sense than Him coming out of the grave.

G.K. Chesterton said in Orthodoxy, “Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom…Such is the madman of experience; he is commonly a reasoner, frequently a successful reasoner.” Chesterton makes it clear earlier in this work that he is not attacking reason, but a reliance on logic can counter the idea of faith. In other words, it is easy to make sense of the crucifixion; it is something that we can feel guilty for. Our sin put Christ on the cross. We are responsible for His death. But the gift of eternal life (which is represented by the resurrection) defies logic.

Christ rising after death grants believers the gift of eternal life, eternal life that we don’t deserve, that we didn’t earn. It is only granted by God’s grace. Trying to logically reason through the idea of grace is what would turn Chesterton’s mathematician into a madman. There is no formula for grace; we did nothing to earn it. God loved us, so Christ died and rose so we could live. After we accept His sacrifice, we owe Him nothing in return. It is poetic; it is a loving Father’s gift that can’t be figured out. Christianity is not based on works; it is based on grace, and it’s that grace that takes faith.

Amen!

Starting tomorrow, I’ll be enjoying four blessed computer-free days at Wheaton College’s “Ancient Faith for the Church’s Future” conference on the early church fathers. Coming up next: quotes from Mark Galli’s Jesus Mean and Wild; more favorite poems; “Saving Jesus” Episode 11 (and why there won’t be an Episode 12). Meanwhile, in the tradition of the sitcom “clips episode”, enjoy these posts from the recent past:


George Herbert: “The Dawning”


Same-Sex Love and the Bible

Learning From Art’s Flaws

Christians Writing and Reading the Forbidden

N.T. Wright on the Redemption of the Whole Cosmos


“Where the New Age has made its greatest inroads has been, I think, at the points where the church has allowed itself to slip into the prevailing dualism, with a distant god and a negative attitude towards creation (including one’s own personal bit of creation, that is, one’s body). The New Age offers a sudden and exciting reversal of this: creation, including oneself, is divine. Paul’s gospel offers the reality of which this is the parody. Creation is not God, but God has made it to reflect his own beauty and, ultimately, to share the freedom of the glory of his children. Human beings are not divine, but they are designed to reflect his own image, and to be filled with his own Spirit…

“In particular, the Pauline redefinition of God included, as we saw, the redefinition of the righteousness of God… (In Romans 8) Paul outlines and celebrates the hope that one day the entire cosmos will have its own great exodus, its liberation from bondage to decay. The point is this: the covenant between God and Israel was always designed to be God’s means of saving the whole world. It was never supposed to be the means whereby God would have a private group of people who would be saved while the rest of the world went to hell (whatever you might mean by that) Thus, when God is faithful to the covenant in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and in the work of the Spirit, it makes nonsense of the Pauline gospel to imagine that the be-all and end-all of this operation is so that God can have another, merely different, private little group of people who are saved while the world is consigned to the cosmic waste-paper basket. It is not insignificant that the critical passages at this point, the middle of Romans 8 and the middle of 1 Corinthians 15, have themselves often been consigned to a kind of exegetical and theological limbo, with Protestant exegesis in particular appearing quite unsure what to do with them.

“I suggest, in fact, that we should be prepared to think through the question of justice—God’s justice for the world, in the eventual future, and anticipated in the present—as part of the theme of what we cal the righteousness of God. The word dikaiosune, after all, can just as easily be translated ‘justice’ as ‘righteousness’. If it is true that God intends to renew the whole cosmos through Christ and by the Spirit—and if that isn’t true then Paul is indeed talking nonsense in Romans 8 and 1 Corinthians 15—then, just as the holiness of Christian living in the present is a proper, albeit partial, fitful and puzzling, anticipation of the future life of the resurrection, so acts of justice, mercy and peace in the present are proper, albeit inevitably partial, fitful and puzzling anticipations of God’s eventual design. They are not lost or wasted; they are not, in the old caricature, a matter of oiling the wheels of a machine that is about to run over a cliff. They are signs of hope for a world that groans in travail, waiting for its promised liberation.

“When we explore God’s righteousness to its very end, it reveals (as we saw) the love of God—the creator’s love for the cosmos he has made, and his determination to remake it through the victory of Christ over the powers that deface and distort it. God intends to flood creation with his own love, until the earth is filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea. If the gospel reveals the righteousness of God, and if the church is commanded and authorized to announce that gospel, it cannot rest content—for exegetical as well as theological reasons—with anything less than this complete vision. And it cannot therefore rest content while injustice, oppression and violence stalk God’s world. After all, Christians are commanded to bring one small piece of creation—their own bodies—into obedience to the healing love of God in Christ. Christians are to live in the present in the light of what God intends us to be in the future. That, as we saw, is what holiness is all about. How can we then not apply the same point to the whole of creation?”


      — from What Saint Paul Really Said (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1997), pp.162-64

Good Friday Meditations: Stations of the Cross


In the Catholic church that I attended this afternoon for a re-enactment of the Stations of the Cross (the episodes of the Passion story from Jesus’ death sentence to his burial), the priest and lector read these amazing reflections by Mother M. Angelica, P.C.P.A., which can be found on the website of the Christian network EWTN. I encourage my readers to seek out the full text; below, I quote some passages that were especially meaningful to me:


The Second Station: Jesus Carries His Cross

How could any human impose such a burden upon Your torn and bleeding body, Lord Jesus? Each movement of the cross drove the thorns deeper into Your Head. How did You keep the hatred from welling up in Your Heart? How did the injustice of it all not ruffle your peace? The Father’s Will was hard on You – Why do I complain when it is hard on me?

…My worldly concept is that suffering, like food, should be shared equally. How ridiculous I am, dear Lord. Just as we do not all need the same amount of material food, neither do we need the same amount of spiritual food and that is what the cross is in my life, isn’t it – spiritual food proportional to my needs.

****

The Third Station: Jesus Falls the First Time

My Jesus, it seems to me, that as God, You would have carried Your cross without faltering, but You did not. You fell beneath its weight to show me You understand when I fall. Is it pride that makes me want to shine even in pain? You were not ashamed to fall- to admit the cross was heavy. There are those in world whom my pride will not tolerate as I expect everyone to be strong, yet I am weak. I am ashamed to admit failure in anything.

If the Father permits failure in my life just as He permitted You to fall, then I must know there is good in that failure which my mind will never comprehend. I must not concentrate on the eyes of others as they rest upon me in my falls. Rather, I must reach up to touch that invisible hand and drink in that invisible strength ever at my side….

****

The Eleventh Station: Jesus Is Nailed to the Cross


It is hard to imagine a God being nailed to a cross by His own creatures. It is even more difficult for my mind to understand a love that permitted such a thing to happen!…

It seems, dear Jesus, Your love has held You bound hand and foot as Your heart pleads for a return of love. You seem to shout from the top of the hill “I love you – come to me – see, I am held fast – I cannot hurt you – only you can hurt Me.” How very hard is the heart that can see such love and turn away. Is it not true I too have turned away when I did not accept the Father’s Will with love? Teach me to keep my arms ever open to love, to forgive and to render service – willing to be hurt rather than hurt, satisfied to love and not be loved in return.

****

The Twelfth Station: Jesus Dies on the Cross

God is dead! No wonder the earth quaked, the sun hid itself, the dead rose and Mary stood by in horror. Your human body gave up it’s soul in death but Your Divinity, dear Jesus, continued to manifest its power. All creation rebelled as the Word made Flesh departed from this world. Man alone was too proud to see and too stubborn to acknowledge truth.

Redemption was accomplished! Man would never have an excuse to forget how much You loved him. The thief on Your right saw something he could not explain – he saw a man on a tree and knew He was God. His need made him see his own guilt and Your innocence. The Promise of eternal life made the remaining hours of his torture endurable.

A common thief responded to Your love with deep Faith, Hope, and Love. He saw more than his eyes envisioned – he felt a Presence he could not explain and would not argue with. He was in need and accepted the way God designed to help him.

Forgive our pride, dear Jesus as we spend hours speculating, days arguing and often a lifetime in rejecting Your death, which is a sublime mystery. Have pity on those whose intelligence leads them to pride because they never feel the need to reach out to the Man of Sorrows for consolation.

****
That is my prayer today for all whom I have offended and all who have offended me.

Saving Jesus (Episode 10): Bad News for People Who Love Good News


This week’s episode of the Saving Jesus DVD series at my church attacked the doctrine of the Atonement, a risky thing to do before Palm Sunday, especially when you’ve just installed an expensive cell phone tower in the belfry.

Debate and disagreement about Christian doctrine are essential for the health of the church, not to mention the world. My complaint is with the intellectual sloppiness and spiritual dishonesty of this series, which habitually misrepresents opposing views and portrays controversial positions as proven beyond doubt. The speakers pose as Christian theologians while forcing religion through the strainer of a secular-rationalist worldview that is never acknowledged as merely one epistemology among many. As far as I’m concerned, every episode should begin with the “South Park” disclaimer that “All characters and events in this show – even those based on real people – are entirely fictional…and due to its content it should not be viewed by anyone.”

Episode 10 begins with Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker, co-authors of Proverbs of Ashes, challenging the notion of redemptive suffering. They discuss the story of a woman who was told by her priest to remain in an abusive relationship because Jesus bore suffering patiently and so should we. Meanwhile, the violence against her and her children escalated. Brock and Parker rightly name this as bad theology: Jesus resisted evil, though nonviolently. He did not model helplessness in the face of oppression.

But then they leap from this story to rejecting the entire idea of Christ dying for our sins. According to Brock, “one version” of Jesus’ death is that he went willingly to the cross, his death being a supreme act of love. (Did I miss the “Angels with Dirty Faces” remix where he goes kicking and screaming?) But that model, she says, tells us that the way to imitate Christ is by passively accepting abuse. We should model ourselves on his life, not his death.

It’s never mentioned that this priest’s counsel is not even consistent with the orthodox views he presumably held. Precisely because Christ died for the abuser’s sins, his wife doesn’t have to. Recognizing that we are not the superhuman rescuer, letting go of our fear of being less than saintly, is often the only way to free ourselves from the enabler’s role.

Considering that more than a third of the video was spent on this story, it’s inexcusable that Brock and Parker allow this priest’s advice to stand as the only definition of “the atonement” before they throw the doctrine out the window. Christianity has recognized many theories of how the atonement “worked”, including some that leave it largely a mystery.

Theologian John Dominic Crossan highlights a single explanation, which sounds like a distortion to me. He notes that in the ancient world, it was taken for granted that blood sacrifice was the way to establish or repair our relationship with God or the gods. Crossan says this arose by analogy to human social rituals. When a guest came, you would kill an animal to make a meal for him, or give him an animal as a gift. Similarly, to show “hospitality” to God, a religious community would burn an animal on the altar (the gift) or slaughter it and symbolically share a “meal” with Him. Crossan notes that the suffering of the animal was not the point. Nor did it occur to people that the animal in some way substituted for a human who deserved to die instead. (He’s forgetting the ritual of the scapegoat.) So why extend these concepts to Jesus? Why claim that God wanted us to suffer but made His Son suffer instead?

Some Christian writers may have dwelt on Christ’s suffering in order to move people’s hearts and remind us of the seriousness of judgment for sin. I don’t find that sort of guilt-trip appealing myself, most of the time, but I’ve always assumed it was more of a rhetorical tactic than a belief that God values pain for its own sake.

Perhaps we err in trying to find timeless metaphysical arguments for the necessity of Christ’s blood sacrifice, when the form that the atonement took was simply determined by the historical moment. If Jesus understood himself to be the messiah (see N.T. Wright’s The Challenge of Jesus), he would enact his redemptive role in terms that the ancient Hebrews would understand: as the culmination of the Temple sacrifices that they had been performing to expiate the sins of Israel. Had the Son of God come to earth instead in contemporary America, when we have a much more individualistic understanding of how guilt is acquired and transferred, the atonement might have looked very different.

The basic question that separates Christian from non-Christian beliefs about the death of Christ is simply this: Is reconciliation between God and sinful humanity brought about by our good works, or by God’s unselfish act of love?

The speakers on this DVD would opt for the first answer, to the extent that they believe there is a moral gap between God and humanity at all. New Testament professor Stephen Patterson speaks derisively of the atonement as running up a debt on your credit card and believing Daddy will pay it. It’s called grace, people. There might be a parable or two about it, if you look really hard.

Crossan says Jesus’ death was no different from that of Martin Luther King Jr., or a firefighter who dies rescuing a child. It is a sacrifice not because God wanted somebody dead and you stepped in, but because all life is sacred and giving up your life for others makes it particularly holy. You lived in a heroic way, knowing it could cost you everything.

Bishop John Shelby Spong offers a surprisingly moving gloss on this theme, but unfortunately undermines it a moment later. The cross, he says, is the story of someone who reaches out to those in pain, even when being tortured himself (“father, forgive them”). Dying, Jesus was more alive than those around him, because he was still taking care of others. “You live to the degree that you possess yourself sufficiently to give yourself away.” Of course, Spong then adds, most of these stories aren’t literally true…. So instead of God dying for love of us, we have the largely imaginary story of a human role model. Pretty thin gruel, you ask me.

During the discussion period, my minister (though I have vowed not to darken this church’s doorstep till he leaves next year, I don’t know what else to call him, and I’m too much of a lady to name names) made a very revealing comment about the agenda behind this class. Countering a participant who professed belief that Christ’s sacrifice reconciled us to God in a way that no other human martyrdom could, the minister said that insisting on the uniqueness of the atonement was a path to religious intolerance.

Now, there are many Christians, myself included, who distinguish between “salvation through Christ alone” and “salvation through belief in Christianity alone”. No less an authority than the Catholic Church has come around to some version of this “inclusivist” position. C.S. Lewis could also be found in this camp.

But what I found most telling was that my minister was judging theological values in terms of political ones. He is deeply attached to the liberal creed of civility and compromise, and shapes his spirituality to fit it. The political realm is the one that for him is truly real; these religious ideas are epiphenomena at best, and at worst, threats to a pluralistic society where peace depends on a spiritual version of “don’t ask, don’t tell”.

This is why it’s such a travesty to be showing this DVD series under the auspices of a church. Its whole agenda and methodology are about subordinating Christianity to modernism, treating the faith as a wholly human creation to be reshaped for our changing purposes, not as a revelation from God that also reshapes us. If the church can’t make the case for God’s sovereignty, who will?

Saving Jesus (Episode 8): Passion and Compassion


The theme of this week’s Saving Jesus class was “Jesus’ ministry of compassion”, but the most fruitful part of the class was the discussion period, when our minister asked us to talk about the greatest acts of compassion we’d experienced or witnessed. This invitation was met with a silent, reflective period that gave rise to a further question: why was it so hard to come up with examples of spectacular compassion? Probably because true compassion doesn’t call attention to itself. Jesus had some harsh words for the Pharisees who made a big show of their alms-giving.

Com-passion literally means “together-suffering”; the central fact for you in this moment is the other person’s pain, not your need to be a helper or even your unselfish impulse to solve her problems. In its purest form, it means gratuitously descending into a place of suffering and helplessness, simply in order to be present with someone else who didn’t choose to be in that same place.

Jesus’ ministry of compassion, then, can be seen to go beyond the earthly works of mercy that were the sole focus of this week’s video. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16, KJV)

This series is at its best when it reminds us of the difference between God’s kingdom and Caesar’s. One of the obstacles to compassion is our fear of powerlessness. As one of the class participants said, we’re afraid to acknowledge the other’s suffering because it reminds us of our own. In a situation of oppression, moreover, compassion looks like a luxury we can’t afford. On the DVD, Prof. Luther Smith argued that Jesus gave oppressed people the key to a spiritual power greater than any political force that was exercised against them. Whatever their worldly situation, they always had the freedom to wield God’s power of love, by seeing the oppressor as a fellow human being even when calling him to account for his sins.

For a modern-day, psychologically nuanced and safe model of compassion in abusive relationships, I recommend the Boundaries series by Drs. Henry Cloud and John Townsend, and the book Don’t Forgive Too Soon by Dennis, Sheila & Matthew Linn. Tara Brach’s Radical Acceptance explores the interplay of compassion for self and others from a Buddhist perspective, but Christians will recognize many points of commonality.

I’ll be absent from next week’s class (no doubt to the delight of my minister) because I’ll be attending a reading of this book, but will try to borrow the DVD after hours so I can find out “Who Killed Jesus?” (Hint: It wasn’t Kristin Shepard.)

Saving Jesus (Episode 7): Thy Kingdom Come


The most recent installment of Saving Jesus, which was about the “kingdom of God,” opened my eyes to the political dimension of the Lord’s Prayer. We say, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,” and then ask God to meet our personal needs for food, shelter, and physical and spiritual security. I’d always pictured the two halves of the prayer interacting thus: We ask God for those protections, but ultimately accept whatever He sends us —
His will, not ours. And yet we still ask, because we are humble enough to admit that we’re still mortal men and women who need to worry about these survival basics, not angels who can spend all their time (do angels have time?) praising God.

On last week’s DVD, retired bishop John Shelby Spong suggested an additional reading. This prayer was important to the early church, facing persecution and trying to cling to its commitment to nonviolence. Those Christians would have prayed that they’d have what they needed to survive from day to day, and not falter, till they brought about the kingdom, till God’s will was done on earth as it was in heaven.

This reminded me of something the pastor at the evangelical church said in a recent sermon. (I’m not ready to call it my evangelical church, but they’re starting to grow on me….) Forgiveness, he said, is how God sweeps flat the obstacles in our soul so that the winds of the Holy Spirit can blow freely through us. Without detracting from the utter gratuitousness of the gift, it’s comforting to think that God gets something out of the deal as well. We’re set free from sin so that we can be what God wanted us to be, not just for ourselves but for the benefit of the whole world. What God does for me, He does in some sense for everybody’s sake.

Also on the DVD, theologian John Dominic Crossan further demonstrated how the language we use to describe Jesus was a direct political rebuke, really a satire, of the divine titles that Caesar Augustus claimed. To a first-century hearer, “Jesus is God” would have meant that the God I believe in looks like Jesus, not Caesar. He’s a God who brings about peace by doing justice, not through violent conquest. According to Crossan, “Was Jesus divine or not” is a phony question. The real question was “Is Jesus God or is Caesar God?” In other words, which side are you on?

While I actually think the Incarnation is deeply important to our understanding of salvation, I welcome Crossan’s additional gloss on the topic. The strength of this DVD series is its restoration of the historical and political meanings of the gospel; I only wish they didn’t feel the need to play those meanings off against traditional theological and personal ones in an either-or kind of way. N.T. Wright does a much better job integrating the two. Still, half a loaf, etc.

Crossan’s summary of Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom is as follows: God has inaugurated a new era, but we are called to actualize His promises in how we treat each other. It can’t happen without God, but it also can’t happen without us. As a solution to those endless “faith vs. works, free will vs. sovereignty” debates, I like this just fine.

Walter Wink: “Homosexuality and the Bible”

Distinguished theologian Walter Wink is a professor emeritus of Biblical interpretation at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City. His books include The Powers That Be, a discussion of Christian nonviolence and social justice. (Unfortunately, he also thinks Jesus was only human, but then, so is Walter.) In this article from the Soulforce website, he offers a provocative critique of the Biblical case against homosexuality (boldface emphases are mine):


Paul’s unambiguous condemnation of homosexual behavior in Rom. 1:26-27 must be the centerpiece of any discussion.


For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.


No doubt Paul was unaware of the distinction between sexual orientation, over which one has apparently very little choice, and sexual behavior, over which one does. He seemed to assume that those whom he condemned were heterosexuals who were acting contrary to nature, “leaving,” “giving up,” or “exchanging” their regular sexual orientation for that which was foreign to them. Paul knew nothing of the modern psychosexual understanding of homosexuals as persons whose orientation is fixed early in life, or perhaps even genetically in some cases. For such persons, having heterosexual relations would be acting contrary to nature, “leaving,” “giving up” or “exchanging” their natural sexual orientation for one that was unnatural to them.


In other words, Paul really thought that those whose behavior he condemned were “straight,” and that they were behaving in ways that were unnatural to them. Paul believed that everyone was straight. He had no concept of homosexual orientation. The idea was not available in his world. There are people that are genuinely homosexual by nature (whether genetically or as a result of upbringing no one really knows, and it is irrelevant). For such a person it would be acting contrary to nature to have sexual relations with a person of the opposite sex.


Likewise, the relationships Paul describes are heavy with lust; they are not relationships between consenting adults who are committed to each other as faithfully and with as much integrity as any heterosexual couple. That was something Paul simply could not envision. Some people assume today that venereal disease and AIDS are divine punishment for homosexual behavior; we know it as a risk involved in promiscuity of every stripe, homosexual and heterosexual. In fact, the vast majority of people with AIDS the world around are heterosexuals. We can scarcely label AIDS a divine punishment, since nonpromiscuous lesbians are at almost no risk.


And Paul believes that homosexual behavior is contrary to nature, whereas we have learned that it is manifested by a wide variety of species, especially (but not solely) under the pressure of overpopulation. It would appear then to be a quite natural mechanism for preserving species. We cannot, of course, decide human ethical conduct solely on the basis of animal behavior or the human sciences, but Paul here is arguing from nature, as he himself says, and new knowledge of what is “natural” is therefore relevant to the case….

Clearly we regard certain rules, especially in the Old Testament, as no longer binding. Other things we regard as binding, including legislation in the Old Testament that is not mentioned at all in the New. What is our principle of selection here?

For example, virtually all modern readers would agree with the Bible in rejecting: incest, rape, adultery, and intercourse with animals. But we disagree with the Bible on most other sexual mores. The Bible condemned the following behaviors which we generally allow: intercourse during menstruation, celibacy, exogamy (marriage with non-Jews), naming sexual organs, nudity (under certain conditions), masturbation (some Christians still condemn this), birth control (some Christians still forbid this).


And the Bible regarded semen and menstrual blood as unclean, which most of us do not. Likewise, the Bible permitted behaviors that we today condemn: prostitution, polygamy, levirate marriage, sex with slaves, concubinage, treatment of women as property, and very early marriage (for the girl, age 11-13).


And while the Old Testament accepted divorce, Jesus forbade it. In short, of the sexual mores mentioned here, we only agree with the Bible on four of them, and disagree with it on sixteen!


Surely no one today would recommend reviving the levirate marriage. So why do we appeal to proof texts in Scripture in the case of homosexuality alone, when we feel perfectly free to disagree with Scripture regarding most other sexual practices? Obviously many of our choices in these matters are arbitrary. Mormon polygamy was outlawed in this country, despite the constitutional protection of freedom of religion, because it violated the sensibilities of the dominant Christian culture. Yet no explicit biblical prohibition against polygamy exists.


If we insist on placing ourselves under the old law, as Paul reminds us, we are obligated to keep every commandment of the law (Gal. 5:3). But if Christ is the end of the law (Rom. 10:4), if we have been discharged from the law to serve, not under the old written code but in the new life of the Spirit (Rom. 7:6), then all of these biblical sexual mores come under the authority of the Spirit. We cannot then take even what Paul himself says as a new Law. Christians reserve the right to pick and choose which sexual mores they will observe, though they seldom admit to doing just that. And this is as true of evangelicals and fundamentalists as it is of liberals and mainliners.


The crux of the matter, it seems to me, is simply that the Bible has no sexual ethic. There is no Biblical sex ethic. Instead, it exhibits a variety of sexual mores, some of which changed over the thousand year span of biblical history. Mores are unreflective customs accepted by a given community. Many of the practices that the Bible prohibits, we allow, and many that it allows, we prohibit. The Bible knows only a love ethic, which is constantly being brought to bear on whatever sexual mores are dominant in any given country, or culture, or period.


The very notion of a “sex ethic” reflects the materialism and splitness of modern life, in which we increasingly define our identity sexually. Sexuality cannot be separated off from the rest of life. No sex act is “ethical” in and of itself, without reference to the rest of a person’s life, the patterns of the culture, the special circumstances faced, and the will of God. What we have are simply sexual mores, which change, sometimes with startling rapidity, creating bewildering dilemmas. Just within one lifetime we have witnessed the shift from the ideal of preserving one’s virginity until marriage, to couples living together for several years before getting married. The response of many Christians is merely to long for the hypocrisies of an earlier era.


I agree that rules and norms are necessary; that is what sexual mores are. But rules and norms also tend to be impressed into the service of the Domination System, and to serve as a form of crowd control rather than to enhance the fullness of human potential. So we must critique the sexual mores of any given time and clime by the love ethic exemplified by Jesus. Defining such a love ethic is not complicated. It is non-exploitative (hence no sexual exploitation of children, no using of another to their loss), it does not dominate (hence no patriarchal treatment of women as chattel), it is responsible, mutual, caring, and loving. Augustine already dealt with this in his inspired phrase, “Love God, and do as you please.”


Our moral task, then, is to apply Jesus’ love ethic to whatever sexual mores are prevalent in a given culture. This doesn’t mean everything goes. It means that everything is to be critiqued by Jesus’ love commandment. We might address younger teens, not with laws and commandments whose violation is a sin, but rather with the sad experiences of so many of our own children who find too much early sexual intimacy overwhelming, and who react by voluntary celibacy and even the refusal to date. We can offer reasons, not empty and unenforceable orders. We can challenge both gays and straights to question their behaviors in the light of love and the requirements of fidelity, honesty, responsibility, and genuine concern for the best interests of the other and of society as a whole.


Christian morality, after all, is not a iron chastity belt for repressing urges, but a way of expressing the integrity of our relationship with God. It is the attempt to discover a manner of living that is consistent with who God created us to be. For those of same-sex orientation, as for heterosexuals, being moral means rejecting sexual mores that violate their own integrity and that of others, and attempting to discover what it would mean to live by the love ethic of Jesus.


Read the whole article here.

Shower of Stoles Exhibit Affirms GLBT Christians


Now through March 14, Smith College in Northampton, Mass. is hosting the Shower of Stoles Project, an exhibit of liturgical stoles and other sacred items from gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender church leaders from 26 denominations in six countries. These beautiful one-of-a-kind vestments are accompanied by personal stories of the wearers’ quest to share their spiritual gifts with a congregation that also accepts their sexual orientation. There are also “signature stoles” covered with messages of support from straight allies. 

The exhibit will resonate with anyone who has ever loved a church community yet felt pressure to hide one’s difference from them, whether that difference is ethnic, sexual, theological, class-based, or a matter of personality. This Robert Frost poem, which was displayed with the exhibit at Smith, spoke to my own continuing sadness about not finding a church that loves gay people and preaches the gospel:


Desert Places

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it–it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less–
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars–on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

(I find it amusing in a sick way that the banner ads accompanying this poem online are for “Funeral Ringtones” and “The Soulmate Calculator”.)